


all i ever wanted

by hypophrenia



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, mostly - Freeform, my god there are Way too many tags for cullen/amell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 18:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18266561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypophrenia/pseuds/hypophrenia
Summary: Cullen and Solona (or, rather, the memory of her) throughout the ages.





	all i ever wanted

**Author's Note:**

> took a break from fgo and hanako-kun and wrote this at 3-4am yesterday and its 3am rn. fuck it i'm tired and no one betas my shit
> 
> in my defense of the bad characterization i have this to say: i've played all the games in reverse order, only a little bit of each (i got to meeting hawke/winter palace in dai, then i went to da2 and played until somewhere in act 3, and then literally until lothering for dao. i literally don't get anything)
> 
> we collecting ships that can't be possible given canon! amell/cullen and hawke/varric are in rn, next one i dive into will form the holy trinity

The Amell mage is pretty. He realizes the existence of this thought only after it runs through his mind, and Cullen, wet behind the ears as he is, freaks the entire time she’s listening to her Harrowing death sentence. She’s always been pretty, really, and her eyes narrowed gently when she smiled her small, tilted smile, and he actually remembers when she smiled at him once, in passing, when he was—

She’s a mage. A mage! She’s a mage walking to her Harrowing as he wrangled with his inappropriate thoughts, and if anything goes wrong he’s the one who has to put her down, strange infatuation or not. That’s not to mention everything else, how utterly wrong it is to feel what he’s feeling, whatever it may be. 

Still, when Solona Amell is not possessed and is taken back to the apprentice quarters without much fuss, her promotion certain, he is more than relieved he doesn’t need to take a life. He’s relieved he doesn’t need to take hers, and realizing that is painful, horrible sin. 

(Still, he can’t help but praise Amell’s Harrowing to anyone who asks.)

Everything after leaves much to be desired.

The first thing the desire demon shows him is Amell in senior enchanter robes, smiling up at him.

“Cullen,” the desire demon says in her voice, “it’s been so long. Have you missed me?” Louder, then, she speaks more pretty words about what she’s been up to, in her soothing tone of voice, and Cullen doesn’t know any better until the desire demon dressed as what he could never have steps closer, hands coiling around his neck, smile toothy and eyes wide open.

“Who—” he begins, which is when he starts realizing something’s wrong.

“We could be together,” Amell, fake, desire demon Amell speaks, voice beginning to rumble in the way a demon’s does. “Just _let me in_.”

“No,” he says, “no, nono _no_ —” 

But by then it’s too late.

\---

He thinks about the Hero of Ferelden before her final stand. He thought about her before his...incident with the desire demon, thought about her before her name became a heavy weight all of Thedas would hold in precious regard.

Mostly, it is offhand and too fleeting for him to stop. Something like _she smiles like her_ , or _he has the same hair color_. Each recollection of her is a prick, a swift dagger’s stab after Denerim, but each year he remembers a little less about her. That might be worse.

Once, he dreamt of a time in the Tower when he helped her lift a few books. They hadn’t exchanged names, nothing more than simple pleasantries and the _thank you_ and _you’re welcome_ after they were done, but she had smiled her tilted smile, let her eyes crinkle, and he wakes up thinking of a dead girl. A dead _woman_ , dead the day she became a Grey Warden.

“I knew an Amell, once,” he tells a relative of hers, when he’s in Kirkwall and has far too much to bear. “She was a special woman. Never met her like again.”

There’s no pretty way to call her a martyr, but somehow it fits with everything he had ever deigned to know about her when he was younger and more naive. He remembers hearing of injuries she received for the sake of birds and smaller animals, doing most things other apprentices asked of her. Smashing the phylactery of a blood mage, because he was a friend.

Hawke, nothing alike to elegant, gentle Amell, pauses to stare for a moment. He should change the subject. He’s going to. In fact, she’s here for something, which means he’s going to ask about it right now—

“Glad you met her, then,” Hawke says, and Cullen almost forgets who she’s talking about before it comes back to bite him in the ass. And it stings, but when has it not? He gets over the memory of Amell, always a tidewave, soon enough.

“...me too, I guess.” He holds that thought, remembers a prison with a demon in the guise of his youth’s greatest sin, and his instinct is always to recoil. He only flinches a little. “...so, did you need something?”

Despite Amell’s relations with Hawke, he finds the two different enough where it doesn’t hurt. Though, sometimes Hawke, in all her energetic, sarcastic mannerisms, smiles in a quirked lip and eyes that seem to wane. Her normal smile is all teeth-baring and boisterous cackling, so her quieter one always makes her face softer, and he sees what he shouldn’t.

But Hawke, unlike her distant relative, is selfish. Mostly, it’s infuriating; fewer times, it makes him secretly relieved he doesn’t have to see another martyr. One is already enough for a lifetime.

\---

“I heard from Hawke about, y’know, the Hero of Ferelden.” The Inquisitor opens with this, after having wriggled around in front of him for two minutes. Obviously curious, seeing as she devoured all news of the Champion of Kirkwall from Varric, and absolutely swooned over any of the dwarf’s stories of Kirkwall. The Hero of Ferelden wasn’t sacred enough for her to keep her hands off, it seemed.

“So you’re talking to the Champion now? I thought she was busy at Weisshaupt.”

“Oh, she is.” Trevelyan finally sat down, before promptly deciding to sit sideways so she could hang her legs off the arm of one side. “But she has enough time to gossip. We have so much in common, don’t you think?”

“And this relates to me, how?”

“Well,” Trevelyan says, “we’re both human, female mages. So was Amell.”

Anyone would think that after all this time Cullen was over his ancient crush. Apparently not, because his heart still leaps when he hears that name, in all its bratty betrayal.

“You knew her, didn’t you? Hawke said as much.” Trevelyan gets that smug smile, lips lifted up (both sides relatively equal, her eyes unchanging—it’s a more comfortable expression) when she knows she’s onto something and she’s right. Which she is, but he doesn’t want to goad her on when she’s already casually examining her nails, a very obvious show of her immense conviction.

“I...did. I attended her Harrowing, actually.”

“And?” Trevelyan waits, still looking for flaws in her surprisingly well maintained manicure. 

“I...had feelings for her. She’s the reason why I’m alive now, and I...suppose I said some things to her back in the Circle Tower that I regret to this day.” It’s more than that; a world more than just simple regrets, but he didn’t have decades to lay down every wayward thought, every painful, melancholic reflection. So he doesn’t say that. Trevelyan picks up on it anyways.

“She was great in the textbooks. Made me wonder if she was real sometimes, she just seemed that nice. ‘course, you got Leiliana waxing poetry about her and Maker knows who else is out there with their ancient memories.”

Trevelyan is bad at getting to her point sometimes.

“I mean, Amell was just...larger than life. The whole hero package.”

Trevelyan is also very good at touching on subjects which are probably best left alone.

“I don’t know, it’s just… You know, even when Hawke was still new to Kirkwall she heard about you having a huge crush on Amell. Hell, I bet even back in the old Circle days there were rumors.”

There were. Admittedly, a lot.

“Kinda makes me feel like an asshole asking this, but are you, uh...still holding on to her?”

And there’s her point. Or not her point yet, her _lead up_ into her point.

“Well,” Cullen starts, and then stops. “I,” he begins again, and then decides that’s no good either. 

“Take your time,” Trevelyan airily tells him, the smug smile coming back. 

The right answer should be that he isn’t; but he does, and it’s easier to admit it now. It should be. He’s not a templar, not bound by the rules which tormented him so, but it feels strange admitting out loud that he’s still thinking about a dead mage, years after her death. 

“She,” he begins, then resolves to finish his sentence. “She was”—memories of meeting Hawke in Kirkwall—“special. You don’t forget someone like her so easily.” 

Trevelyan’s smile, for whatever the reason, seems sadder but still smug. “No, I guess you don’t.” She stops her preening and faces Cullen with more seriousness than he ever thought she could muster; even with every dragon and every battle she had encountered thus far. “Word of advice?” 

“Yes?” He’s still hesitant about it; her advice usually leads to maiming on a good night. 

“Not really advice, now that I think of it, but...Amell would’ve loved you, given the chance. Nothing you can do about the world state you’re in right now, but in another life, definitely…” 

It’s not the first time Cullen’s heard something that hardly makes any sense from the Inquisitor, and it won’t be the last. “World state?” 

She dismisses him quickly with a wave of her hand. “Inside joke. You wouldn’t get it.” 

“If you say so.” 

Swinging her legs over the chair’s arm to plant firmly on the ground, she hopped up and stretched, popping every joint in her body with a gruesome crack as she did so. 

“I’ve got to write more letters to Hawke. Our friendly mage gossip group isn’t going to run itself.” 

“Have fun, then,” he drawls, and Trevelyan only laughed as she sauntered to the door. 

“Honestly,” she mumbled, pulling open the door with a dramatic sweeping of her arm, “I named her Komaeda in my first run. Dunno how everything ended so dramatic.” 

Mages. He’ll never understand them. 


End file.
